Update: Signet Fires Cassie Edwards Over Plagiarism Scandal

We didn't spend a lot of time on the Cassie Edwards scandal here, although Elaine did have a very timely post on the subject of plagiarism in novels. But this is just a quick update for those of you who might be interested. Signet let Cassie Edwards go, reverting all the rights they owned back to her. (You can find the whole, pathetic story in the right sidebar of the Smart Bitches blog.)

And tune in later today for a wonderfully bizarre My Town Monday from Clare, who spent the weekend at the Comic convention.

Another Link

For Clare's Super Linky Tuesday (below). I've just added a link to Lee Lofland's new blog to our Research Sites for Writers. Lee's blog, which he calls a "guide to all things cops and robbers," is chock full of good information for the criminally minded! Not to mention pictures. I chose a relatively innocuous one for this post, but today he has a lovely picture of a gunshot wound, for those who aren't faint of heart or queasy of stomach.

Turning Spam into Crown Roast of Pork

The past several months, I’ve been picking away at planning out a new novel. I had intended to write this particular novel for Nano, but my computer crashed four times, so I never even finished my character and setting sketches. However, I’ve spent enough time with the story in my head that I know it inside out.

Since it’s another book in the series my last book belongs to, I also intimately know a good number of the characters. Thank goodness. Mind you, it’s not that I dislike creating characters. Rather, it’s naming them I despise. It stymies me. Big time.

It’s not that I can’t think of names. I can think of a ton of names. But when I chart them out, I discover I have the same problem as the client I complained about a while ago. All my names begin with the same few letters. Or too many end in i or y. Or they all seem to have two syllables. Or they sound too much alike. You get my drift.

And when I finally come up with The Perfect Name, it eventually turns out to be the wrong nationality. Or the wrong generation. Or it’s a name I like, but other people feel it imparts the wrong impression.

To make character naming just a tad less torturous, I’m always on the lookout for good new sources of names. I have two character-naming guides and about half a dozen baby-naming books in my bookcase, plus I have several character- and baby-naming websites bookmarked. I also hang on to old phone books. Someone on one of the email discussion lists I belong to recently said she collects college yearbooks for this purpose. Someone else mentioned the various name-generator programs available on the internet. One I use that has a free version is simply called Random Name Generator, by Kitchona Software, and lets you specify gender and nationality.

But as I was downloading my email this morning, I realized I had a slew of names free for the picking right in my inbox. Just today I got messages from Linda Toure and German N. Camp. I might be wrong, of course, but I believe Ms. Toure, who would like me to provide a bank account into which she can temporarily deposit her $18.3 million, won’t mind if I borrow her name for the character I’ve just been calling “the receptionist.” And Mr. Camp, who suffers from word salad but seems to be offering to sell me medications that he’ll ship very fast, might feel honored if he becomes one of my homicide cops.

I know! I’ll order some Viagra. That should yield enough character names for the rest of this series and maybe even a couple more!

Trust a Lexicographer, Cartographers, Never!

I thought this was a lovely image, even if it doesn't entirely pertain. It's called Sphinxes with Dictionary by Francine van Hove.

1) Did you know this is a magical time of year? Shmaltz aside, it must be, because of all the protections that developed for this window between Christmas and the New Year (alternatively through Epiphany on Jan 6th). Erin McKean, a real-live lexicographer and proprietor of the great word blog Dictionary Evangelist, has written for the Boston Globe detailing some of the oddness in her article Season of Superstition:

...People born on Christmas are considered either fortunate, as they supposedly cannot be drowned or hanged, or unfortunate, because they are more likely to be able to see ghosts and spirits. (Sir Walter Scott said that the Spaniards attributed the gloomy mood of King Philip II, thought to have been born on Christmas, to his frequent ghost sightings, and not - as we might imagine - to always having his birthday and Christmas presents combined.)

Some also believe that those who are born on Christmas Eve turn into ghosts on that day every year while they sleep. If you were born on Christmas Eve and don't want to have this happen to you, the remedy is to count the holes in a sieve from 11 o'clock on Christmas Eve until morning...

2) Perhaps that didn't catch your interest though, because you're too involved in assigning addresses and realistic geography to your plot-in-progress. Well, if you're writing about San Bernadino County, for example, be extra careful using a Thomas Brothers map for reference, because they've salted in over 100 fake streets to catch anyone making unauthorized duplications. Copyright traps, as they're called, are no urban legend among cartographers. As usual, the Straight Dope has the low-down.

I suggest we all borrow Cecil's excellent and pithy defense against errors in his own work.
Mistakes, my arse. Copyright traps.

NaNo and the New Friday Feature?

I know I've mentioned this in the comments, but I'm pledged to NaNoWriMo this month for what I hope will be my own 50,000 words in November. This year, something like 90,000 folks signed up for the free, bragging-rights challenge. Today, our cumulative, self-reported word count is now up to 295 million!

Some people wonder about the quality of work generated by such an exercise. I understand, but quality's not the primary goal here, though flashes of brilliance always occur. The goal is to get involved, excited, and committed to this unique act of creation. If nothing else, the multitudes involved become more passionate readers, and that helps us all. And because I despise my first drafts, churning through them with a cheery scrum at my back is preferable to solitary misery. The MS my agent is trying to sell now is one whose first draft I finished during my first NaNo, and I hope to repeat the feat. NaNo demands that writers loosen up enough to be willing to generate garbage, but, outrunning your headlights and speeding across the chasms allows for unexpected wonders to happen, too. One feature this year is a weekly pep talk from a pro to our inbox. Here's the first:

When you sit down to begin that novel of yours, the first thing you might want to do is toss a handful of powdered napalm over both shoulders---so as to dispense with any and all of your old writing teachers, the ones whose ghosts surely will be hovering there, saying such things as, "Adverbs should never be...", or "A novel is supposed to convey...", et cetera. Enough! Ye literary bureaucrats, vamoose!

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works. Ah, but how can you know if it's working? The truth is, you can't always know (I nearly burned my first novel a dozen times, and it's still in print after 35 years), you just have to sense it, feel it, trust it. It's intuitive, and that peculiar brand of intuition is a gift from the gods. Obviously, most people have received a different package altogether, but until you undo the ribbons you can never be sure.

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

A topic is necessary, of course; a theme, a general sense of the nexus of effects you'd like your narrative to ultimately produce. Beyond that, you simply pack your imagination, your sense of humor, a character or two, and your personal world view into a little canoe, push it out onto the vast dark river, and see where the currents take you. And should you ever think you hear the sound of dangerous rapids around the next bend, hey, hang on, tighten your focus, and keep paddling---because now you're really writing, baby! This is the best part.

It's a bit like being out of control and totally in charge, simultaneously. If that seems tricky, well, it's a tricky business. Try it. It'll drive you crazy. And you'll love it.

Tom Robbins

Shall we declare Fridays a day when we can all post updates about what we've been doing in the comments? That might include very-official things like actually writing works-in-progress or activities related to publishing. And Great! But, as far as I'm concerned, it might also be: mulling over an idea that's still percolating; reading or watching something inspiring (or envy-inducing); researching; keeping a personal journal or blogging; perhaps taking the necessary time and space to clear the cobwebs between efforts; even handling the peskiness of "real-life", so you can clear the decks for writing later. For so many of us, writing demands much but probably doesn't pay the mortgage (yet- stay hopeful). Feel free to stretch the definitions, and tell us what you've done for your writerly self this week.

In Reference to Murder

Our new friend, BV Lawson, has amassed a large and detailed link library over at the In Reference to Murder Blog. click here.

Need to look up some legalese? Click on BV’s law link, to open a long list covering everything from "before the needles," a site that looks at the history of executions in American before lethal injection, to the Federal Courts Law Review.

Want to know what’s available on Podcast? Click on her media link for a terrific pod list and lots of sites about radio, tv, screenwriting and more.

Need a respite from trying to find the perfect break point for chapter 15? Mosey onto BV’s game link. I spent way to much time there today, which prompted me to write this blog post. (I warn you now, stay away from GODOKU.)

So, thanks, BV Lawson, for all the effort you put into pulling together an excellent research site for all mystery lovers, both the readers and the writers among us. And an extra thanks for including Women of Mystery in your blog links.

Terrie

A Fistful of Universe

Is there such a thing as too much muse?

I've got more and more friends with blogs. RSS feeds to watch. Experts generously willing to expound on weapons and poisons and forensics. Way too many forums and digests...every one a must-read for a mystery writer.

And the wikis! The newsfeeds! The videos! The trivia! I've got speed-reader envy.

Month after month, while ramping up my reading, I considered all the fodder a grand gift, none of it to be spurned lest the muse sabotage my internet connection. But quite suddenly I've found that, for the sake of sanity, I've got to slow down my consumption of all things internet. My head's about to explode.

Don't get me wrong. I recognize the Web for the creative ocean it is, and believe me, I'm grateful. But I'm a perfectionist. Always have been. I find it difficult to do a half-ass job of anything. Must be on top of every subject I write about. Be fully prepared. So when I'm handed ideas on a platter, I've got to turn every one of them over. Just to be sure the next isn't better than the last one I pocketed.

After all, I learned at Dr. Seuss' knee. This exhaustive - and exhausting - study brings to mind Horton Hears a Who.

“I’ll find it!” cried Horton. “I’ll find it or bust!
I SHALL find my friends on my small speck of dust!”
And clover, by clover, by clover with care
He picked up and searched, and called, “Are you there?”
But clover, by clover, by clover he found
That the one that he sought for was just not around.
And by noon poor old Horton, more dead than alive,
Had picked, searched, and piled up, nine thousand and five.

Then, on through the afternoon, hour after hour…
Till he found them at last! On the three millionth flower!
“My friends!” cried the elephant. “Tell me! Do tell!
Are you safe? Are you sound? Are you whole? Are you well?”

Yup. That's me. Maybe I could keep it up if I knew there was only one dust speck that harbored a Whoville. But on the internet you find them with every nth click. What if I miss one? (Now if I just try the search this way....)

I've concluded that I've got to allow whole galaxies of Whos to drift right on by. Learn to skim, sift, and dabble, then trust I've got enough to go on. Allow other writers to pick up the strays.... Because it's not as if the drops are finite in this enormous sky. I can dip in a hand and grab a fistful of universe. Let the stars dribble out between my fingers.

Plenty more where they came from. No worries. Yeah, right.

- Lois

Criminal Inspiration: Fake Rock

Not cubic zirconia, and not these guys either, a faux band assembled way before Spinal Tap to advertise Sony's stereos in the 1970s. Today, I mean something else entirely.

Since I'm often unable to think of a single, substantive thing to comment upon thoughtfully-- my fellow WOM set the bar admirably high-- I hope the dog days of summer also welcome quick, refreshing posts. And, as you may know, I find criminal oddities as refreshing as the tiny bubbles in champagne, perhaps even in a mimosa for the extra Vitamin C. I adore health food!

While crime fiction is populated with a seemingly endless supply of crafty, patient Supergenuises, real crime involves lots of people like this one:

A woman was arrested after she called police to help "get her money back" after she was unhappy with the crack cocaine she purchased...She told officers she broke the rock into three pieces and smoked one, only to discover the drugs were "fake."

So unfair! I don't mean her deceptive dealer but the tragic fact that writers outside of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiassen, or Victor Gischler would probably have trouble sneaking such an entertainingly irate consumer into their own manuscripts without accusations of farcical implausibility. Stay cool, and let the buyer beware.

Potter Fans Make Creative Use of Wikipedia

Has anybody else out there stumbled on the enchanting use that fans of the Potter series have made of Wikipedia? There's an entire web of pages about the magical world Rowling created. Richly linked and described in loving detail. Take this snippet from the page about Death Eaters.

Every last one of these blue and purple terms are live links to additional pages. The ones pictured here reflect a mere fraction of the collaborative pages devoted to documenting the characters, magical beings, toys, tokens, and titles in the series.

I'm in total awe. Sort of the way I felt when I read The Lord of the Ring in high school and relished the detailed maps, elfin language lexicon, and rune lore that Tolkein provided at the back of my edition.

By the way, Tolkein's series is similarly documented in Wikipedia. Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is not quite so generously hyperlinked, but similar attempts have been made to capture his fantasy world. In fact, I'm guessing any fantasy with devoted fans will ultimately receive wiki treatment.

Seeing fantasy worlds mapped out this way makes me wonder if creating a personal wiki for the mystery I'm writing might not be a bad idea. Come to think of it, I've got most of the pieces in files already...blurb, synopsis, character studies, scene list, timeline, research notes.... It wouldn't be hard to convert to wiki format and set up the links. It would be fantastic to hook all these documents together in a single wiki. Hey, I've even got snippets of free-writing 'by' various characters, and digital pictures of some!

I know, I know, I do tend to go overboard. But there's free software available to do this kind of thing, and naturally, once my book's famous (!) I can make portions of my own personal wiki available to Wikipedia....

- Lois

Mining YouTube for Scene Details

It's not news to you all, I'm well aware. But the internet is a goddess-send for writers, and I intend to do a bit of genuflecting here.

Take yesterday. I was halfway through my novel's third revision when suddenly it hit me that I needed to insert a brand new scene that takes place in a hospital's psychiatric ward. I won't say I've never had occasion to visit one, but it's been awhile. So I googled 'video, lock down psychiatric unit' and found a number of clips.

There is nothing like video at your fingertips for capturing details...in this case, the mannerisms of patients and attitude of attendants.

And have you tried YouTube for accents? Voice?

My protagonist's a Kiwi expatriate and while she's mostly American at this point, her spitfire sister newly arrived in the States is not. My visit to New Zealand was a year and a half ago. I'm losing the Kiwi cadence, inflection, pronunciation, and modulation. To say nothing of the attitude. So I googled 'video, kiwi personalities' and, after wading through all the YouTube hits for the current #1 animation about the flightless bird (called Kiwi! but a warning is called for - it's a tad heart wrenching) I came up with the sensational Squeegee Bandit and a number of others including a Burger King commercial bordering on soft porn and a discussion of the differences between Kiwi vs Canadian use of the expression 'eh' at the end of sentences.

Need a scene landing a helicopter? Firemen coping with a bomb in a building? Cleaning staff in a hospital? A heart transplant? With more than 300 websites offering free video footage, there's very little not available at the stroke of a few keys. And don't forget news clips. I'm sure we're all grateful to MSNBC for providing a link to a 26-minute long video on building a vest-bomb. I'm dead serious, folks. (Well, maybe the thriller writers among us....)

I don't recommend videos as a replacement for all your research. The details we write shouldn't be entirely visual and auditory. What about the grit in your character's eyes and teeth and the wind in her hair? To say nothing of that sulfur stench emitting from an aging camry while it tackles a climb up Mt. Peter....

My problem? I return to the manuscript only at gunpoint. So what's your favorite video research story?

- Lois

Hispaniola in the Rainy Season

From the Wiki, this is Howard Pyle's very stylized painting of Captain Kidd, who appeared more like a bewigged Founding Father in life.

It's Friday the 13th, which I only note because I'm a fan, even if its significance and character are largely augmented by 20th century hype like another big favorite of mine, Halloween.

This is only a vaguely writerly post, though I'm sure I'll get ideas and settings I can use, and hope to come away with some actual prose written. Several months ago, a dear friend of my husband was golfing at a charity event and won one of the putting contests. This entitled him to a week-long stay at a villa on a beach resort's golf course in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. With five empty bedrooms, he asked us and some other folks if we wanted to go along. Sure! We leave Sunday.

I've been to the capital city of Santo Domingo once before but on a day trip. Had a fine time, rode horses, saw paintings of watermelons, bought a colorful wooden bird, drank cool things and sweated. Further north, and on the Atlantic coast, Punta Cana is defamed by travel writers as being less "authentic" because it has such a high number of glossy new private resorts and communities staking out gated chunks of beach and inland. You may also read, as my husband unfortunately did on CNN's front page yesterday, that part of the reason for this vigilance is because the bright, sandy coasts are still bait for modern-day pirates, primarily those smuggling drugs from Columbia through Venezuela into the D.R. and then to Puerto Rico. Final stop, Anytown USA.

Since childhood, I've been a fan of pirate lore, reading a fair number of whaling and explorer stories, too. I can't explain why these tales of the grimy desperadoes of the high seas captivated me, but they did and do. The Dominican Republic shares 2/3 (including the east side) of the Antilles' island of Hispaniola with the smaller nation of Haiti. Both these spots have their beauties as well as their horrors, though the DR's in better governmental shape. But seeing their shapes on old maps still excites me. Hispaniola's many tucked-away anchorages and climate has made it desirable for use by legit and not-so entities since the Colonial era.

In fact, Captain Kidd's last crew turned on him with predictably consistent disloyalty and was rumored to have divided and buried the vast treasure of the Quedagh Merchant (scroll down) along Hispaniola's eastern coast. This while Kidd, whose identity as pirate or privateer is still hotly debated, was sailing north to his eventual capture, extradition, and hanging in England. I do believe that today's smugglers have more congenial places to land on the 800 miles of coastline than in the middle of a knot of folding chairs and beach bars, so I'm not too concerned about that, but even I can't reason away bad weather.

So far, every forecast we've looked at calls for thunderstorms and/or showers every day. My husband has three tee times in jeopardy. Storms only threaten my beach time, and I'm more of a veranda-sitter anyway. I've self-tanned a bit, just to avoid any reflective blaze that might disrupt the International Space Station. Truly, lightless aquatic species whose underbellies have never seen the topside of the Marianas Trench look swarthy by comparison. Anyway, compared to spending days in a swimsuit, I'm much less averse to tromping through nature preserves or anywhere else in the rain. I know what you may be thinking, wicked things, but I don't melt in it.

Sure, the rainy season is a good time for the resort to use up some otherwise vacant space for a good cause and good publicity. Or it may be that like Florida and Hawaii, it rains a bit every day and is done. Can't tell yet and I don't care. My blessedly-indoor spa appointments are made, both sunscreen and umbrella are packed, I've got my laptop, favorite pirate stories, a sketchbook and camera to get myself into trouble. I'd love to come back as relaxed as Ramen, but I hereby declare myself ready for an adventure, and half-hope not to get too much of one.

What adventures (anticipated or dreaded) will you be dredging for inspiration?

Research Sites for Writers

There are many, many useful sites on the web. The sites here are a small sampling and they are all searchable so you can find what you need when you need it.

I am always looking for more reliable, searchable sites, so if you know of any, please let me know. I am also collecting sites of use to writers generally. (See sidebar.)

General Research Sites:

• How Stuff Works
  Want to know how an autopsy works? How about a rifle? A shark? An iPhone? It's all here, including photos and videos.
  
  
• Wikipedia
  The encyclopedia written by Internet users. You will need to check and recheck information gotten from the Wiki because it's not always reliable, but many articles have reference information that can easily be verified.
  
  
• Snopes
  This is the urban legend database. If you're not sure whether your character should reference an outrageous story because it might not be true, check Snopes. If you get email claiming you could win a million dollars by forwarding it to ten people, check Snopes. (Or don't bother. It's a hoax.)
  
  
• The Straight Dope
  If you're not familiar with The Straight Dope, you're in for a treat. Cecil's columns span a variety of topics including "What Are The Nine Eskimo Words For Snow?" and "Where Are All The Baby Pigeons?" Searchable archive.
  

Topic-Specific Research Sites:

• PubMed
  Database of the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine.
  
  
• Medline
  The "consumer" branch of the PubMed database. The information here is no less correct, but geared toward laypeople.
  
  
• The Graveyard Shift
  Lee Lofland's blog, which he calls his "guide to all things cops and robbers". Lee has great pictures of all law enforcement related stuff. (Not for the faint of heart, however, since today when I checked he had bullet wound pix up.)
  
  
• WebMD
  Where most people start their medical research. A great place to have your characters look if they need something. I've had varying reports of the quality of the information on WebMD, but there's no doubt that it's the best known of the web's medical sites.
  
  
• CrazyMeds (explicit)
  CrazyMeds is not a medically sanctioned site. The information there can be brutal, tasteless and inflammatory. If, however, you're looking for side effects and complications from neuro- or psycho-active drugs, it's the best place I've ever seen to get the information. It takes some getting used to, but is a valuable resource nonetheless.
  
  
• LawGuru
  I can't vouch for this site, so you might want to take the answers given with a grain of salt, but people tell me the answers are accurate. The link takes you to the "search previous answers" area, though you can pose your own questions on other parts of the site as well.
  
  
• The Catholic Encyclopedia
  This is a fabulous resource for all things Catholic. Searchable Bible.

Home, Home on the Range

Not a western range, not a kitchen range, but a gun range. Last Saturday, Clare and I went to a range to learn how to shoot a gun. Well, I went to learn, Clare turned out to be quite a markswoman, based on her experience trap shooting when she lived in Texas. Our foursome included Randy Kandel, the new president of the NY/Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime, whose short story, “Name Tagging” will be released in Fall 2007 as part of the anthology, Murder New York Style, and another Sister in Crime, Tama Ryder, who is presently shopping her new thriller, The Loft. I don’t know how to do the “click here” links that my able colleagues whip out so easily, so I’ll just give you Tama’s website and you can read all about her and The Loft. www.tamaryder.com

So there we all were in Ridgewood, New Jersey with a very patient instructor named Mike Maione, who spent hours teaching us the intricacies of the mechanics and safety that every person should know before they pick up a gun. Shooting is definitely not as easy as the gang-bangers pretend.

After lunch, we each loaded, shot and reloaded and shot, etc. a .22 semi-automatic. Up close and personal, guns are loud, and when you pull the trigger, the gun has a definite kick. The shooter has to be in tight control.

Mike answered a lot of questions that probably don’t come up in his usual training sessions, but he’s taught other Sisters in Crime, so he’s used to weird questions.

Thanks, Mike, for helping us to more realistic writers. Someday one of us may have a character named Dirty Harriet filling her magazine and blasting away the bad guys. And she'll do it all safely!

Terrie